Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Sometimes an echoing or answering poem, sometimes a second voice, the "ghost text" in Spine mimics and examines the difficulty of processing information from multiple sources at once. The distraction that accompanies reading ruptures the experience of these poems. Too much and too little co-exist here: the challenges of living in rural areas that technological advances have left behind throw into relief the disorienting speed with which the world is changing.
Remanence
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Synopsis currently unavailable.
A Map of Faring
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
A Map of Faring holds three major poetical sequences meditating on particular places: an English wood, a Transylvanian valley, and a house in southern France, as well as poems of places in Austria, Germany, The Czech Republic, Italy, Spain and elsewhere. In these, landscape and encounters become the vocabulary of a personal exploration of senses of time and passage, and the fate of small localities in the spread of global forces. A Map of Faring reckons with acts large and small, that are transforming the world, even as it searches to understand, within that reckoning, the possible regenerative presence of art.
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
The poems in Morgan Lucas Schuldt's debut collection, Verge, speak at once both brokenly and reparably of the body, of its lusts and devotions, its violences and "satisflictions." Schuldt's lyrics exploit the phonetic suppleness of the English language in a way that teases out (mischievously so, earnestly so) an ecstatic, carnal, tender kind of poetics that pays homage—in both name and spirit—to poets like Hopkins, Celan, Crane and Berryman, as well as ekphrastically to painters Francis Bacon, Joan Miro, and Hironymous Bosch.
They Who Saw the Deep
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
At the heart of this collection of poems is the nature of water, water as giver and taker of life, luxuriant and lethal in equal measures. It is set against the backdrop of the shipping forecast and weaves the myths and legends of the ancient Mesopotamians through a litany of migrations down the ages to the present day.
Dismantling the Angel
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Synopsis currently unavailable.
Go On
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
The miniature poems that comprise Go On, Ethel Rackin's second collection, constitute distilled moments in time that paradoxically extend our field of concentration and vision. Focusing on various kinds of survival-personal, political, environmental-Go On asks what it means to endure in unsure times. By turns collaged, diaristic, and panoramic, the poems that make up this collection combine to form a kind of crazy-quilt of lyric association and connection.
Pilgrimly
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Attentive to telling detail. The metallic bloom of bright silences. Hieratic: Instructions for a vigil. Augury: We could ruminate, luxuriate, and divinate in the language of these exquisite poems. They give the light with their own eyes. There is gold on their tongues. Their words marry or refer. Lure or long. In the alchemical brilliance of Siobhán Scarry's stunning debut collection, we walk the page as if the earth, feeling each word a footstep, and each footstep marking our PILGRIMLY progress. How surely the poems move us to their spacious pilgrimage. Offer proof of Presence. Fiery. Cerebrally.
An Unchanging Blue
Selected Poems, 1962-1975
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
An Unchanging Blue provides a generous sampling of translations (with German originals) taken from ten collections of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann's poetry published between 1962 and 1975. An extensive introduction by Mark Terrill contextualizes Brinkmann's place in postwar German literature.
Between the Twilight and the Sky
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Jennie Neighbors's new book BETWEEN THE TWILIGHT AND THE SKY is a brilliant, engaging adventure for the reader. Great poems in three Cantos wherein we are brought into "the direction the poem must travel" and find "the anomalous you must meet to become." Hers is a "music that winds." -ROBIN BLASER
Child in the Road
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Child in the Road is a mother's response to the sudden death of her young daughter, a rendering of the wide range of emotions experienced afterwards--not description, but an expression of grief from its center. The poems pull vivid imagery from the deepest layers of the unconscious, postcards from a sleepwalker unable to find rest, waking again and again in the wrong story. Who is alive and who is dead? What does it mean to go on living, "eyes searching / under the earth"?
The Bodies
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Tracing the intertidal circuits of story and understory, of body and soul, of land and sea, Christopher Sindt's sensitive and intelligent poetry offers "a foundation for becoming." Acutely attentive to the ways ecology and its theology sing in harmony, The Bodies strikes chords-voices and forms laid among and alongside each other.
Contrapuntal
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
An understanding of the nature of consciousness reveals itself to be more elusive the longer one tries to approach it. The closer we get, the more vivid the confusion is. And this is the case regarding not only our handle on consciousness, but also the one we have on identity and even on reality itself, both of which depend upon consciousness-and all three of which, ultimately, prove more malleable than we might care to admit. They can be, and are often, altered by pharmaceuticals, self-scrutiny, the influence of others, one's own force of will, illness, and even just through our constant interplay with what we call the world.
The Magnetic Brackets
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Synopsis currently unavailable.
Parallel Resting Places
Poems
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
What happens when a poet tries to filter the untranslatable from another language? The rush of unknowing, decoding the wind, the body becomes an antenna. Following behind Jack Spicer's After Lorca and swinging its ovaries, Laura Wetherington's second book uses the concept of translation to create original poems from the work of writers like Liliane Giraudon, Marie Étienne, Dominique Fourcade, and Jean-Marie Gleize. These poems run through a liminal linguistic space where meaning, mishearing, and dreams collide, sometimes midsentence, where they hinge into song: "My man animal took shape in a shadow, / climbed over an obstacle, / became the void." Interstitial love letters to queer writers process a miscarriage, the most recent election, and queer puppy love. This is a book of yearning-for a foreign tongue, for a body growing inside the body, and for a form of communication that can capture feeling.
Physis
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
For over twenty-five years, NICOLAS PESQUÈS has been writing an homage to Juliau, the mountain he sees out his window. In PHYSIS, the fifth book of the series, he weaves philosophical reflection in and out of an encounter with the body of the mountain, the body of language, and the human body that bridges the two. Employing an exquisitely spare, precise phrasing, PHYSIS underscores the distance on which all landscape is based, searching out the ways, in which humans work to make a home on earth.
The Prison Poems
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
THE PRISON POEMS is the first complete translation into English of Miguel Hernández's Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, a classic of 20th century Spanish poetry, comparable in many respects to the work of Lorca and Pablo Neruda. The poems in this book were mostly written, while he was in prison after the defeat of Republican Spain.
We'll See
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
We'll See, originally published in France in 1995 as On Verra Bien by le dé bleu, is Georges L. Godeau's first book translated into English. This is a collection of ninety brief prose poems, most of which focus on ordinary people and events. Godeau's prose poems are disarmingly and deceptively simple, yet resonate with each other.
Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air is a collection of poems wealthy with the speaker's intimacy with nature and with the philosophical and spiritual insights that emerge from a deep practice of close observation. In a manner that is wonderfully relaxed and conversational, Jacobson's poems enter into the most venerable and perennial of our human questions.
Condominium of the Flesh
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
A darkly humorous exploration of the human body and its various functions in poetic prose, Valerio Magrelli's The Condominium of the Flesh, a personal chronicle of his clinical experience, catalogues a life history of ailments without ever being pathological.
No Shape Bends the River So Long
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
What to make of this grand experiment over months and miles of river by two poets, not one-Monica Berlin and Beth Marzoni-plus whatever third spirit they've invented together? Like music from the 8th century written by Anonymous, that haunting ubiquitous voice, these poems feel unsettlingly interchangeable, keep coming like the country's longest river dream-documented here in a rich rush, dense with repetition and sorrow by poets who 'think like a glacier or a stone, sand... years / like consistent rain.' The Mississippi never had better companions or more devoted ones, save Mark Twain perhaps, or more to the point, his troubled, star-crossed Huck. The sense of human and nonhuman history, even prehistory stuns, keeps bothering this shared-solitary work.
Current
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Lisa Fishman's Current follows The Happiness Experiment (Ahsahta, 2007) further into an experience of time as theater, weather, myth, insect body, plant life, transcription, synchrony, and figment. Her poems are pressed into argument and song by means of attention to the moment and to cross-currents of making, of music, over time. Current enacts a poetics of the uncanny in very close touch with the actual, creating a field of vibrations in which the possibilities and limitations of vision and art collide and change.
The Forever Notes
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Plato wrote in the Timaeus of time as the moving image of eternity. In Ethel Rackin's THE FOREVER NOTES each of these terms finds resonance: the fleeting objects of the world are moving, and persons moved, her lyric syntax builds pictures that dissolve into song and then turn back to image again, the eternal endures in its endless transformations.
The Thinking Eye
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Jennifer Atkinson's The Thinking Eye, her fifth collection, looks at the syntax of our living, evolving world, paying close attention to the actual quartz and gnats, the goats and iced-over, onrushing rivers. The poems also look at the looking itself-how places and lives become "landscapes" and the ways the lenses of language, art, ecology, myth, and memory-enlarge and focus our seeing. If it's true, as Gaston Bachelard says, that whether a poet looks through a telescope or a microscope, [she] sees the same thing, then what Atkinson sees is an earth filled with violence and beauty, human malice and ten thousand separate moments of joy. Clearly in love with the earth and the (English) language-all those inter-dependent lives and forms-Atkinson pays attention to both with a Bishoppy eye, a Hopkinsy ear, and an ecopoet's conscience. Behind the book's sharp images and lush music creaks Chernobyl's rusty Ferris wheel.
& in Open, Marvel
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
& in Open, Marvel grapples with wonder in everyday existence. A sense of quietness through seasonal change threads the interlaced contemplations in the collection, which approach the twice-removed space we occupy from the physical world. The act of mind and body is experienced as a journey for both writer and reader. How we are all elements in fall. How we are all purpose. How what makes us connects us. How there are lovely works beyond us, which in turn, include us. How we plead to ourselves, See... just see.
Canticle of the Night Path
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
With Canticle of the Night Path, Jennifer Atkinson sets in motion a deeply compelling sequence of praise songs. Whether their origins are remote in time or close to hand, the objects of her praise become intricately connected as each is illuminated in turn--by electric light, by candle-light, by lightning. She models a patient attention that gives way to sudden insights and the reader is transported by the clarity and music of her forms. -Susan Stewart, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and MacArthur Fellow
The Curiosities
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Brittany Perham's first collection, THE CURIOSITIES, fixes its sure and unsettling gaze on daughters and fathers, sisters and brothers, madness, sickness, longing and love. These poems make up a cabinet of curiosities because they hold what is fascinating or frightening, beautiful or awesome- a "stomach plumed by syringe," a "zoo's lost leopard," a "forest of high-waisted trees"- up to the eye. In their image-making, the poems place language itself beneath the glass slide of a microscope in order to discern its component structures, its natural patterns. Curiosity here is a way of looking-unsatisfiable, looping back on itself, yielding only further questions. In these uncanny and passionate poems our own lives are made strange to us, and we are wonderstruck.
Quarry
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Since at least the days of Horace, poets have found in nature, in the local flora and fauna, an invitation to observe, name, meditate and wonder. In QUARRY, Carolyn Guinzio's second collection, this tradition continues, in poems of tautly drawn, subtle eloquence. Her tone is somber, her pace gradual, as if, at any moment, something might happen to alter everything and toss the great endurance of life into ruin, or revelation.
This History That Just Happened
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Synopsis currently unavailable.
These Beautiful Limits
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
In this new collection of poems, Lisk delights in the transparency and obliquity of language. Invested with a "jocoserious" sensibility, he explores the borders of language and the ways it defines identity-the quotidian language of everyday life hovering on the edge of forgetfulness.
Under the Quick
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
In Molly Bendall's fourth book of poems, the verbal underworld of doing and undoing-oath, love charm, prayer, curse-becomes a refuge of tenderness and malediction. One of her generation's most subtly imaginative poets, Bendall overhears-and whispers to the reader- a lost language, which is by turns brainy and promiscuous, clueless and inscrutable, bewitching and bereft: a voice skirting a strange silence, a "goblin market" of snares, cures, trifles, and métiers inconnus. Under the spell of these poems, worlds once imagined break into growls and fingersnaps undoing the rough magic of impersonation.
Sunshine Wound
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Synopsis currently unavailable.
Signs Following
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Signs Following explores how the language of poetry can engage with history, temporality, and the fact of embodiment in the physical world of change and difference, while yearning for some transcendent guarantee of meaning.
Divination Machine
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
We have confessional poets, who write about themselves; nature poets, who write about place; experimental poets, who write about language. And we have F. Daniel Rzicznek, who finds "many centers to the world," whose Divination Machine resists simplification into any one category. Rzicznek is a poet for whom "Everything / is a piece of the vision."- H. L. Hix
System and Population
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Christopher Sindt's System and Population returns to the primary theme of Sindt's earlier collection, The Bodies: the impact of human desire on the natural world. System and Population focuses on the proposed damming of the American River canyon in northern California-working with source texts such as geologic studies, government documents, and the diaries of gold miners-to study the intersections of personal experience, scientific study, and the politics of rivers and dams. It is a personal eco-poetics that embraces the tradition of the lyric, experimenting with collage and the explicit inclusion of historic and scientific data. System and Population meditates on human experiences, such as parenthood and loss, and also studies the dissociative effects of environmental damage and disaster.
Erros
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
An album of lavish residuals, Erros is a "somewhat song... in the last of the light, the disassembling light." Schuldt's rich play with language is always aware-painfully aware, erotically aware-of its mortal stakes. These are the poems Hopkins would have written were Hopkins a skeleton, a faint web of salt on a dirty stone, a "nakeshift," a "sakesbelieve." And with Hopkins's sense of humor, too: such delight in the final turning of a phrase, a body, a breath. Erros is, in Schuldt's perfect reckoning, "l=u=n=g=u=a=g=e" made "violable-hollow-bright." - G.C. Waldrep
Split the Crow
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Synopsis currently unavailable.
Spool
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
By turns skeptical and ecstatic, musical and sprung, Spool is a formally adventuresome love poem to marriage, language, parenting and illness in the early 21st-century.
Wonder Rooms
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Synopsis currently unavailable.
Puppet Wardrobe
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Puppet Wardrobe is a pop-up book, surprise is in its element. In search of the "dateless lively heat" that Shakespeare sourced to Cupid, Daniel Tiffany finds "the infamous promiscuity of things" in broad display. As watchword, you have the poet's "slang for the pink redoubt," the chummy vulgarity beneath prosody's underthings: say hello to the New Flesh.
Fifteen Seconds without Sorrow
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Like many younger Korean poets, SHIM BO-SEON writes in an allusive, indirect style about topics that are in themselves familiar, eating rice, taking off clothes, living in an apartment block, struggling with human relationships. He captures some sparkling moments of joys and sorrows, hopes and frustrations that have been concealed in daily life in rather modest and witty words. The circular movements of concealment and revelation of the mystery that an individual experiences are evoked in turn, always lightly. As a poet-critic, Shim fills his lines with the melodies of plain speech, with subtle thoughts about relationships in the world. Shim made his poetic debut in 1994, but he only published his first collection fourteen years later in 2008. FIFTEEN SECONDS WITHOUT SORROW is a translation of that first volume, containing the poet's earliest, freshest poems.
The Book of Isaac
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
The Book of Isaac is a sequence of 56 'distressed', or damaged, sonnets in which Aidan Semmens endeavors to distil something of the Russian-Jewish experience from the history of his own family, in particular that of his great-grandfather, the economist, lawyer, journalist and socialist Isaac Hourwich.
13 Ways of Happily
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
If ostranenie-to make strange-is the mandate of contemporary poetry, EMILY CARR has achieved this both brilliantly and beautifully. Kaleidoscopic in its glimmering slivers, the life she brings us is built of charged familiars slightly and completely changed: the sun turns on its stem; the stallion rolls in a pasture of blue ether. Although she references poetic antecedents from Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams to Joan Retallack and Mary Ruefle, it's not their voices, but their facility for invention, itself here reinvented, that keeps waking us up into a world sometimes alarming, often unsettling, and always careening until we, too, arrive.
The Wash
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Rich in river imagery and an intense sense of the passage of time, The Wash explores the incessant music that permeates journeys with a destination unknown. The poems depict a landscape of loss in which language and images provide the only concrete platform on which to stand. Playing a lyrical voice against the limits of silence, Adam Clay's The Wash uncovers the voices that can be made, and heard, in and out of nature.
Country Album
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
Synopsis currently unavailable.
Blood Orbits
Part of the Free Verse Editions series
BLOOD ORBITS is a series of poems and prose poems exploring various conceptualizations of history both as a generative principle of meaning and as particular contexts and events through which we shape our subjectivities. In language that is richly musical and startlingly surreal, these poems interrogate and confront narratives that encode oppression, violence, and dishonesty, both the "grand narratives" which structure our place in history as well as the stories that we as individuals tell ourselves to make sense of our lives in their dailiness. In writing that is at once philosophically sophisticated and restlessly energetic, the poetry of BLOOD ORBITS brings to life what Wallace Stevens called "the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind," exploring ideas as ideas, but also evolving a poetic language that squarely confronts the consequences of those ideas in real human lives.